


you're dead and outta this world

by angel_deux



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Vampire AU, What We Do In The Shadows AU, and Cersei's ghost possessing a terrifying porcelain doll at one point, featuring the starks as the werewolf pack, mix of show and movie canon bc I'm lazy and like them both, stannis as an EV because he bores me, unlike my usual vibe of 'mix of show and book canon because i'm lazy and hate them both', verry little beyond comedy actually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:29:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26219404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: What We Do in the Shadows AU. "They don’t care who hired you,” Stannis says to the documentary film crew, during one of his early confessionals. “There’s nothing a vampire likes more than talking about themselves. They’re just happy you’re pretending to listen.”
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 60
Kudos: 305





	you're dead and outta this world

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr memes have, yet again, led me down the path of spiraling out of control for a few days after being presented an idea. So...shoutout to the person who said they wished I'd write a What We Do in the Shadows AU. If you like it, you're welcome. if you hate it, you have only yourself to blame!

“Ser Jaime was the one who turned my mistress,” Podrick says to the documentary film crew. He’s glowing with pride when he says it, and he says _Ser Jaime_ with a kind of coy look, like he thinks they should be impressed by the fact that he knows such a celebrity as Ser Jaime Lannister, allegedly dead figure of legend. Sure, Lannister is mostly remembered as a sister-fucking almost-king, but he’s still _famous_. 

_Why_ a documentary film crew has posted up in a house filled with vampires in the first place, none of the roommates seem sure. Every vampire, when asked if they were the one who extended the invitation, denies it, but they are all quite good at lying, and so that doesn’t narrow it down. The familiars who flit in and out of the periphery of the house all deny it too, and they would know better than to lie, considering what Cersei did to the _last_ liar among them. Eventually the vampires decide that one of them must have hired the crew on some kind of good blood high and then forgot about it.

(“They don’t care who hired you,” Stannis will say later, during one of his early confessionals. “There’s nothing a vampire likes more than talking about themselves. They’re just happy you’re pretending to listen.”)

The others range from tentatively interested to distrustful to openly hungry, but Young Pod has taken to the newcomers. Pod _isn’t_ a very good liar, and he has been suffering for it in the two years since he started working as Brienne’s familiar. He clearly likes having the opportunity to tell the crew everything that he has been bottling up.

“Why did he turn her?” one of the crew asks. Pod puffs up, looking even more proud than before.

“He turned her as a thank you for saving his life.”

* * *

“Who said that? Did she say that? _Podrick?_ ” A scoff. “She _didn’t_ save my life. She has got to stop telling people that. Especially silly children who worship her and believe everything she says.”

Ser Jaime Lannister, once an unparalleled swordsman and a knight who gained notoriety for killing two kings and also being into incest, has chosen to film his confessionals in his room, with the backdrop of an eclectic collection of paintings that have been done of him over the years. He has hung them at random, in frames of varying size and quality. Some of the paintings are tacked to the wall, their edges curled with age and poor treatment. Half of them portray Jaime as a beatific fellow with a giving gleam in his eyes and his arms outstretched. Others portray him as some kind of hybrid bat monster. The reality is that this legendary historical figure presents more like a sulky overgrown schoolboy.

He and his twin sister have their own bathroom, because their shared hair product needs the space. He removes the top two buttons of every one of his button-up shirts just as soon as he buys them. On some of them, he removes three. He still dresses like it’s some vague previous time, in tight breeches and knee-high boots and shirts that are too blousy to be fashionable today. Like someone who was really having a blast a couple hundred years ago and decided to try and cling to that feeling as long as possible. His hair is long and golden, with tumbling curls that are, like the shirts, probably too feminine-looking to be considered “stylish”. He somehow wears all of it well. If there’s something Jaime Lannister is remembered for aside from the whole “railing his twin” thing, it’s the fact that he was pretty enough that some of his contemporaries took the official position of “I mean, I _get_ it” when the twincest was discovered, and the reality certainly lives up to that reputation.

In a modern setting, he comes off as hopelessly out of place in a way that might be endearing. He flops onto and around furniture rather than just sitting in it. He always seems to know where the camera is, and his entire image is of this vapid, too-pretty Romantic hero. None of the crew have fallen for it, because there’s an intelligence sparkling behind his eyes that he tries to hide, and they’re all too wary of vampires to buy whatever kind of act this is.

“Pod _and_ Brienne say differently,” prompts one of the nameless crew. Jaime scowls at him.

“Brienne’s just trying to get a rise out of me. That’s what she does. She didn’t save my life. That sword strike wouldn’t have killed me. It barely would have maimed me, and that’s happened plenty of times. I would have been _fine_. But…” Here, a hint of actual discomfort. He recovers quickly. “I just hadn’t managed to figure out how to tell her what I was, yet. So she just…jumped in front of me. Like a _fool_. And would have died if I hadn’t turned her. She can complain about it all she wants, but it was _her_ fault for being so eager to throw her life away.”

* * *

“I _would have_ saved him,” Brienne clarifies when the documentary crew finds her in the living room. She’s using her powers to levitate Pod so that he can clean the high ceilings, a task he seems to find delightful. Brienne seems more like a flustered mother hen worried for her chick. “How far can humans fall before it hurts them?” she asks at one point. “I’ve forgotten.”

Brienne is a tall, stately woman. _Tall_ here meaning not “like five foot eight” but “easily six foot three” and _stately_ meaning “incredibly ripped”. She, being a woman originally born in a place and time known for their lack of kindness to women—to an extent where history books sometimes seem like they were written by a dude with some unexamined fetishes—is mostly remembered in the modern era for being both strong and ugly. Sins of their own during her lifetime, but they have helped her become something of a folk hero in the years since her alleged death.

She also never fucked a sibling, which helps.

When she speaks, it’s deliberate and careful, fully examined before it leaves her mouth. She is careful with her strength, too, especially when it comes to Podrick; she admits to never being sure how strong she really is around humans, now that she has spent so long with vampires. She is the only one who seems disturbed by her powers, rather than proud of them.

Brienne chooses to accentuate her height and broadness rather than avoiding it. She seems at home in everything she wears, like someone who has spent the last hundreds of years getting comfortable in their skin. Her sense of fashion is also a bit more evolved than Jaime’s; she has landed somewhere in the last three decades, at least. Most of what she wears is neon, and she wears a lot of acid-washed jeans and tracksuits that make her look like someone who took up running twenty years ago and never bought another article of workout clothing ever again. Her short-ish blonde hair is perpetually straight, always hanging limply when she wears it down; apparently, the Lannisters aren’t fond of sharing their product. Mostly, Brienne wears her hair pulled back into a small ponytail. When the documentary crew speak to her the first day, the ponytail is held in place by an oversized purple scrunchie. She’s wearing a teal green windbreaker with haphazard purple and blue triangles on the front.

“When I go out, I like to blend in,” she says, defensively, when one of the crewmembers mentions her choice of style. “But there’s no use throwing these clothes away. They’re perfectly good clothes. This coat is barely thirty years old. And what does it matter what I look like in here? The others have all seen me in worse.”

When Jaime enters the living room, seemingly with no purpose except to watch Brienne and Podrick while splaying on a settee, Brienne appears to regret her determination to dress unfashionably in the house. She fiddles with the windbreaker, zipping it up and down and finally taking it off and tying it around her waist, putting her enormous biceps on display in a black tank top. She takes her hair down and then puts it back up again. She pretends not to notice him. Jaime pulls out a book and stares at the page he opens to at random. Brienne resolutely looks at the other corner of the room. Pod dangles in the air, looking not quite steady, but he manages a roll of the eyes down to his new pals on the documentary crew.

* * *

“Ser Jaime is in love with Ser Brienne,” Podrick says later, still in the living room. His foot is propped up on a cushion with a bag of ice wrapped around it; Brienne lost her concentration just long enough to drop the boy and sprain his ankle.

(Podrick briefly pretended to be dying so that Brienne would feel guilty enough to turn him. It was Jaime who stopped her and pointed out the obvious lie for what it was. Podrick cheerfully proclaimed that it was “worth a shot”, which made Jaime threaten to kill him for lying to Brienne, which made Brienne storm off furiously. According to Podrick: not an unusual occurrence. He’s been waiting to be turned for the past few years, but Brienne wants to make sure that he’s ready, first; according to her, she still regrets her own turning, and she has spent the past few years trying to talk Podrick out of it. She hasn’t been doing a very good job.)

Podrick is fine, aside from the mild sprain, and actually he’s pretty chipper despite the argument that Jaime and Brienne can be heard having in some other room of the house. “He’s been in love with her for hundreds of years. That’s probably obvious.”

Not strictly speaking, no. It was obvious that _something_ was going in in that exchange, but none of the crew would have guessed that the weird refusal to acknowledge each other was _courtship_.

“Are you sure?” one of the crew asks. Pod nods happily. A bit dreamily.

“Positive,” he says. “And my mistress is in love with him, too. Everyone knows it.”

* * *

“Everyone _does_ know it,” Margaery Tyrell confirms, a bit later, upon being informed what all the yelling downstairs was about. She doesn’t speak so much as purr, and it’s always got a pretty big dose of smugness along with it, like she knows something that no one else in the world is privy to. Based on what little the documentary crew know about her, that’s probably because she does. Margaery Tyrell doesn’t have the same kind of reputation as the Lannister twins or Brienne of Tarth. Her name hasn’t survived the centuries. But the Tyrells are an old family who have prospered through generations of political upheaval by being wily and staying ahead of things, and Margaery seems like someone crammed every Tyrell who ever lived into a juicer to make a concentrated dose of _wily_ and _ahead of things_.

And then that person also gave her fangs and an appetite for blood, which was a _choice_.

Margaery has prepared her confessional area carefully, just like Jaime. She has the biggest living space, because she was the only one willing to sleep in the attic, and so there are divans and settees and armchairs everywhere, most of them draped haphazardly with silk robes. Her space is dimly lit, with dozens of candles ( _a total fire hazard_ , Brienne griped earlier, which seems accurate given how old the house is). The room has enough gauzy scarves hanging off things to make a person motion sick with a bit of a breeze, and it smells overpoweringly of blood hidden just beneath some sickening perfume.

Actually, the longer a person looks around the room, the more they see. The gauzy scarves are usually carefully placed to obscure some crack in the wall or dent in a cabinet where she got a bit violent with some food. The silk robes have been abandoned where they are because they’ve been splashed with blood and Margaery is too lazy to wash them and hasn’t yet gotten around to burning them. The candles don’t do much to obscure the smell, but they do _something_ , and the dim light keeps people from noticing how the red has seeped into the hardwood over the years and has stained it irreparably.

Margaery is lain out on a daybed in nothing but a (new-ish, and therefore not too badly blood-splattered yet) lavender silk bathrobe, smiling with friendly interest at each of the men who stand in an array in front of her. Her hair falls in perfect brown ringlets, and she’s made up to give herself a bit of a blush, so that she looks rosy-cheeked and innocent.

(“Margaery is the most dangerous person in this house,” they had been warned earlier by Cersei, and so they know better than to believe it, but it’s _tempting_.)

“Can you elaborate?” someone stammers, and Margaery sits up, slowly, letting everything drape and settle and shift, drawing the eye to every part of her body. She pretends to be thinking, but her eyes roam over all of them, and each man has the sensation of being sized up. Chosen. What an odd feeling: wanting to be chosen and yet knowing that you won’t survive it if you are.

(“I like boys,” she says in one of her confessionals, later. “But I also like girls. In different ways.” No one in the room, having been on the end of her hungry stare, has any doubts as to what that means.)

“I’m a few years younger than them,” Margaery says, coyly. “Three hundred or so. Not too many, though of course it seems to drive Cersei mad, poor thing. But by the time I joined the gang, the Jaime and Brienne thing was _so_ obvious.” Margaery is the only one who wears her vampirism so openly. When she smiles, her pointed teeth are fully on display. A bit of blood is still dried on the corner of her mouth. It’s impossible to say if she’s left it there on purpose. “She’s never fully forgiven him for turning her, or at least that’s what she says. And he’s never fully forgiven himself for being selfish enough to do it. Really, I think Brienne thought that dying for him would be the ultimate way of proving her love without actually having to speak it aloud. There’s risk in letting yourself be seen so openly, and if you die in the act, at least you don’t have to face it. It’s tragic, the way she thinks. Honestly, she’s nearly a millennia old. She’ll _need_ to get over this shyness at some point.”

“Is it shyness?” one man asks. “Or is it fear?”

Margaery’s eyes light on him. _Roam_ him. She smiles wider, and there is something unnatural about it, though still beautiful, in a way that feels a bit like locking eyes with a hungry creature when you’re alone in a forest, miles from help.

“I’m no stranger to fear,” she says happily. “And I suppose you’re right. It’s not the fear of a prey animal realizing it’s about to draw its last breath. It’s almost the opposite of that. A prey animal realizing that it’s no longer the prey, but the predator, and not knowing what to do about it.” She draws in a deep breath. “Speaking from experience, that’s a strong feeling.”

One of the men stammers something about how they have a hard time imagining her as prey. Margaery laughs. A tinkling, delighted sound.

“We all started out as prey,” she says. “That’s the only way to _become_ a vampire. Just ask Cersei.”

* * *

Cersei Lannister, one-time queen of Westeros, claims not to understand what the documentary crew is asking. She, out of all of the vampires, likes talking to them the least, because she is convinced that Margaery is the one who invited them. She isn’t shy about this accusation, and she isn’t shy about thinking Margaery is working against her, either.

“I was never prey,” she tells them. Her words are harsh, and her green eyes flash with anger already. Her room is opulent but overcluttered, stuffed with gilded décor and gleaming trinkets. Everything in here is probably worth at least twice the value of what’s in the rest of the entire house. The documentary crew don’t linger on Cersei’s possessions, not wanting to upset her, but they manage to get footage of a few things. Several Faberge eggs. Ornately carved boxes overflowing with jewelry. The largest piece of furniture in the room—aside from an antique, absurdly huge bed—is a trophy cabinet filled with crowns. “I have been queen almost thirty times.” She preens for the men when she sees them admiring her collection. “It’s more difficult now that photographs exist and people are much more careful with their records. Harder to fake my death, and harder to kill my husbands.” She sighs a little, probably thinking fondly about the days before forensic science. “But there are still a few places with a monarchy, so maybe one day I’ll add another.” She speaks always as if expecting to be challenged or mocked. It’s easy to imagine her in earlier years, calling for the headsman, so maybe that’s why no one _does_ challenge or mock her. She stands in the exact center of her room, surrounded by her riches.

“How were you turned?” someone asks. Cersei glares at him. Her hands are on her hips. Her dress is an archaic style, cut low in the front and tight around the waist to show off her figure. Odds are good that it came from a costume shop, or else it’s authentic, and hundreds of years old. She’s beautiful, like Margaery is beautiful. Possibly _more_ beautiful than Margaery, allowing for differences in taste, but there’s something hard and unwelcoming about her that contrasts unfavorably with Margaery’s softness. Perhaps that’s down to the difference in age, though each of the documentary crew at least have wits enough not to mention that.

“It was someone I trusted,” she finally answers. “My husband. The king. A witch cursed me. She told me that I was going to die twice, with eons in between. I didn’t believe her until my husband attacked me on our wedding night.”

“What happened to your husband?” one of the men asks. For the first time, Cersei smiles at them. A true smile. Serpentine and cruel.

“I turned my brother the next night,” she says. “And then we killed Robert together. Does that shock you?” Not particularly, but a few of the men give polite nods. Cersei is plainly disappointed. “He was the king,” she says, hopefully. “It was shocking at the time. And they were never able to prove that it was us, either. I’m sure if you were historians…”

“How did you escape?” someone asks.

“I didn’t. Not for a few years, anyway. I ruled the kingdom with my brother by my side. It’s the only time I’ve ever ruled alone.” She digs through a stack of paintings leaning against the wall until she finds the one she’s looking for. It would be better preserved if she had given it to a museum instead of shoving it in a corner for a few hundred years, but the quality isn’t so degraded that the crew can’t make out that it’s a depiction of Cersei and her twin. The twins are painted formally, wearing clothing that looks ridiculous now. They’re nearly identical, bloodless and pale, with close-lipped smiles that hide their fangs. Cersei is seated on a throne, a crown perched atop her golden curls. Jaime stands beside her, his hand on his sword, resplendent in golden armor. “Well,” Cersei admits fondly. “Not alone. We were married in all but name.” She steals a cheeky little glance at the documentary crew out of the corner of her eye. “Does _that_ shock you?”

“Little bit,” one of the crew lies.

* * *

“Yes,” Stannis says. “I know they killed my brother.”

Stannis is a bit of an odd duck in the vampire world, and he’s certainly an odd duck in this house. Every other vampire who lives here is a traditional vampire: don’t like garlic, hate sunlight, drink blood to survive, etc, etc. But Stannis Baratheon is an energy vampire, which means he feeds off making everyone around him as miserable as possible.

He’s very good at it.

“My brother,” he says. “Turned me the summer I turned thirty-one. Or I may have been thirty-two. It’s difficult to remember. I have a book somewhere. I wrote it down. My old familiar, Davos, used to remind me, but I don’t know where he’s gone. He might be dead. I cut off his fingers, you know, Davos, and he used to carry them around in a pouch around his neck. Isn’t that interesting?”

Not particularly, but then, that’s the whole point.

Stannis regales the crew with the tale of his brother’s death from his point of view, and then breaks down the laws of succession at the time, explaining why _he_ should have been king, and why Cersei taking the throne was an outrage, and why his younger brother _attempting_ to take the throne was even more of one. At the end of a half hour, two of the crew have passed out.

“I should stop,” Stannis says reluctantly. “This was supposed to just be a demonstration of my powers, but I got carried away. My apologies. Your energy was very delicious.” Like that’s a consolation. As the men shake themselves from their stupor, Stannis looks at them critically. “Where’s the last man? There were five of you, weren’t there?”

None of the crew can remember seeing the last man after the point at which they left Margaery.

* * *

“We have another roommate,” Brienne says. She stands reluctantly down the hall from Stannis’s room. They keep Stannis in the basement, as far from the rest of the housemates as possible, because his powers work on _them_ just as much as they work on humans. Stannis has a day job at an office somewhere downtown, where he can consume human energy as much as he wants, but the rest of the time he tends to lurk unpleasantly around, waiting for an opportunity to catch one of his vampire roommates unawares. He doesn’t take the opportunity to feed on Brienne now, though. He sticks his head briefly out of his door and then ducks back in again when he sees what they’re about to do, closing it for good measure. “Aemon is very nice,” Brienne says, in the tone of voice people use when they’re trying to be positive about some kind of fatal flaw. “He just takes a little bit of getting used to.”

She knocks on Aemon’s door, which turns out to be the lid of a coffin that’s just propped up in the dankest corner of the basement. It swings open, revealing the oldest, grossest, oddly moist and yet mummified-looking creature that any of the documentary crew has ever seen. Like, these are people who are used to working with vampires. They have seen some wild vampire shit. But they haven’t seen anything like this.

“Hello, Aemon,” Brienne says. She doesn’t sound quite cheerful, but she manages not to sound _too_ disgusted, which is a feat in itself. Aemon makes some creaky, dry noises in reply, which bring nothing to mind so much as those accordion-looking things that people sometimes use to stoke fires. “Yes, this is the documentary crew.” More creaking, this time just slightly inquisitive. “No, we’re not sure who contacted them.” (None of the vampires have actually asked the crew directly yet, and at this point the crew is just curious to see how long it takes.) There’s more creaking, and Brienne smiles over her shoulder at the men clustered behind her. “Yes, I suppose they do look…nice.” _Nice_ , here, being the world’s most obvious euphemism for _tasty_ , but of all the vampires in the house, the crew have come to feel comfortable around Brienne, and they know she would never attack them—she sources her blood herself, by roaming the city at night and waiting to catch someone in the act of attacking someone else, like some kind of vampire vigilante. “Anyway, I just wanted to introduce you. If you need anything…” She doesn’t bother to finish the sentence, just gently closes the coffin and then makes shooing motions for the crew to escape down the hall.

When they’re all back upstairs, someone works up the courage to ask, “how old _is_ he?”

“Oh, no one knows. He arrived one day in the post with an unsigned letter that asked us to take care of him. He doesn’t need much. He’s less work than the time Jaime decided he was very into raising tropical fish.”

“Or when he wanted to crossbreed exotic plants,” Cersei puts in from the doorway. She lurks for a moment, probably making sure Margaery isn’t in the room, before entering.

“ _Or_ when he took up dollmaking,” Brienne says, wrinkling her nose.

“Oh, I don’t know, he made some nice ones,” Cersei hedges. “The _baking_ , though.”

“We can’t even eat anything,” Brienne laments to the crew. “Poor Podrick had to eat a lot of terrible cake.”

* * *

“In my life,” Jaime says, defensively. “I was the greatest swordsman in the world. That’s not a joke, or an exaggeration, or a pointless brag. I really was.”

(“He was,” Cersei admits reluctantly when she’s asked. “It’s so annoying. He never shuts up about it.”

“No comment,” Brienne argues, through clenched teeth.)

“I trained for my entire life. It was the only thing I wanted to do, and I was good enough to make a career of it. My name was associated throughout the world as being _the best_ at something. Do you know what that feels like? Of course you don’t.”

“Your name _now_ is mostly associated with the fucking your sister thing,” one of the documentary crew says. A bit of a bold choice to say what they were all thinking aloud, but to be fair, Jaime _had_ just insulted them, and this is turning out to be a more difficult project than they’d anticipated. They’re all a little on edge (especially the new guy, brought in to replace the one they still can’t find).

“Don’t remind me,” Jaime says. He flops on his back in maudlin annoyance on the couch, glaring at the ceiling. “Anyway. The _point_ is that I want to be the best in the world at something again. I’m still probably the best at swordfighting, but that’s only because there’s so little competition. The only person who can keep up with me is Brienne, but she won’t spar with me anymore. She’s managed to disarm me, what, thirty times now?”

(“Literally,” Cersei says. “Brienne has chopped off my brother’s hand thirty times. Jaime for some reason has never learned to defend against that particular move. I started collecting pictures of them in an album to try and shame him into being more careful. It hasn’t worked.”

“Pictures of…of the hands? Or the stumps?”

“The hands. Well, mostly the hands. You don’t want to see the stumps. It takes about a week for the hand to grow back and, ugh. It’s so disgusting. It comes back first as a baby hand? Small and wrinkled. It’s absolutely hideous.”

She shows them the album, because they’re curious enough to ask, and they all agree that the baby hand is pretty bad.)

“Would Brienne spar with you if we asked?” one of the crew asks.

“Maybe.” Jaime brightens considerably at the thought. “But the fact remains that so few people give a fuck about the art of swordfighting. It’s all hobbyists and collectors, and it’s a whole scene. They can’t actually _fight_. Or if they can, they know all the right technical moves, but put them in a test against a practiced warrior like me or Brienne, and they’re beheaded in three seconds.” He pauses. Looks between them with warning. “Theoretically.”

“Of course.”

“So I’ve been trying my hand at more modern pursuits. It isn’t easy, being the best in the world at something. Especially not these days. Everyone’s got so many fucking _hobbies_.”

* * *

“My favorite was the knitting,” Stannis decides, when prompted. “I usually do my own laundry, and my clothes don’t tend to get bloodied up as much as the others, so it’s not a concern. But poor Podrick has to lug their clothing down to the laundromat every week, and it’s a lot of blood to get out. When Jaime was knitting, there were so many sweaters to choose from, and they were ugly enough that they could be thrown away if they got too soiled. And he got quite creative with the patterns, too. Of course, he wasn’t very good at it. But they made excellent conversation pieces at work.”

“I liked the baking,” Margaery says. “None of us except Stannis can actually _eat_ anything, and Stannis only does it to look as normal as he possibly can in social situations, but it’s so easy to lure a man in with a plate of cookies. And if you alter the recipes just a bit, you can add a nice little sedative so they don’t squirm as much. Less cleanup for poor Podrick later. I never would have thought of it if Jaime wasn’t _constantly_ making cookies for that one month.”

“Definitely the dolls,” Cersei says, with no hesitation. “I don’t know why he thought _dollmaking_ was something that someone could be the best in the world at. I suggested it as a bit of a joke, and he committed. And he made some delightfully horrible attempts. Sometimes we like to hide them in places around the house to scare poor Podrick when he’s cleaning.” She digs through a chest at the foot of her bed until she finds one that’s obviously meant to resemble her. It has a wide porcelain face, enormous green eyes, and a terrifying smile. _Delightfully_ is a stretch, but she got _horrible_ right.

“Archery,” Podrick says, after a long, indecisive stretch where he names at least four other hobbies, then circles back and renames them, and finally decides on _archery_ for good. “He was actually all right at that, I think. Not the best in the world, though. I showed him a Youtube video of this one girl, and he gave it up as hopeless.”

“It’s not that he lacks commitment,” Brienne adds, when she hears this. “He spent almost a hundred years on the garden, and it’s quite a nice garden! I love the plants he chose. But he has all these ideas about what being the best in the world means. It’s half about the chase, anyway. He would never be satisfied if he actually _got_ to be the best in the world. That’s just how Jaime is. He’s always chasing something.”

“Why do you like the garden?” one of the crew prompts. Brienne thinks about it some.

“He didn’t plant any roses,” she answers.

* * *

(“It’s not about the chase,” Jaime says later, indignant. “Who said that? _Brienne_? Does she really think that?” He then stares maudlinly out the window for the next five minutes until the documentary crew gives up and leaves.)

* * *

In those first early days of filming, most of the clashes between the housemates seem to happen because of Margaery. Cersei’s also a frequent participant. Usually, they’re arguing with each other.

“As far as I’m aware, mischief vampires aren’t actually a thing,” Stannis says, from the safety of his basement bedroom. The sounds of a vampire fight going on above disturb his sleep, he says, so most nights he goes up to defuse the situation himself. There’s nothing to break up a squabble like a rehash of a grammar-based argument that he started at the office that day, and if he’s really lucky, the vampires will leave the house entirely to escape him. “But if they _were_ a thing, Margaery would certainly be one of them.”

Podrick, who is standing in the front foyer while the argument rages in the library, seems to agree.

“She’s very nice,” he says, nervously. Cersei’s voice is reaching a crescendo beyond the door, but Pod just keeps talking, slightly louder, his smile taking on a painfully fake edge. “Though you have to be careful when you’re agreeing to something she asks you to do. She’s good at talking people into doing things. And she’s definitely, uh, the messiest eater?”

(“She’s fucking disgusting,” Cersei sneers, when asked.)

(“It’s a wonder we haven’t been caught yet,” Brienne agrees, though it’s the closest thing to negative that she will say about her housemate.)

(“I will not be getting in the middle of it,” Jaime says, and he refuses to answer a single other question about Margaery Tyrell.)

“When you say messiest eater…?” one of the crew asks.

“I mean, if you’re going to do this job, you have to expect a little blood. But with her, it’s…” Podrick shakes his head. He then seems to remember something, and starts a bit guiltily. “By the way,” he says. “Randomly. Total change of subject. I was sorry to hear about your friend. The one who went missing. That’s too bad.”

* * *

The fight in the living room is a common one, according to Podrick and Stannis both. Cersei is accusing Margaery of stealing a kill from her, and Margaery claims she did no such thing. Neither Brienne nor Jaime seem willing to have an opinion, though neither woman will let them leave the room.

(“You know how it is,” Stannis says. “You’re best mates, but one of you has an insufferable sister-ex and the other one has a nymphomaniac murderer for a friend, and they hate each other and might genuinely kill each other one of these days, so you do your best to stay out of it.”)

“I had no idea you were trying to lure Lancel in,” Margaery says, all wide-eyed innocence. She looks to Brienne for help, but Brienne is busy pretending to look for a book to read. “I would never have killed him if I realized! That’s why you always have to mark your food!”

“I said his name _repeatedly_ to Jaime the other night when you were lurking in the kitchen with us. And he’s a _Lannister_ , for fuck’s sake.”

“I thought I’d be doing you a favor, killing one of your relatives so you wouldn’t have to do it.” Margaery is deeply leaning into the whole innocence thing, but the documentary crew aren’t likely to trust _her_ again any time soon. 

“Since when are you so concerned with my feelings?” Cersei snaps.

“Since always, dear sister.” To the documentary crew, Margaery teasingly says, “did you know Cersei and I are related? By marriage, but it’s a funny story.”

Cersei screams, and turns into a bat, and flies away in a huff, back towards her room, squeaking her annoyance the whole way. Margaery smiles wider. Jaime sighs, looks at Brienne for help that doesn’t come, and then turns into a bat and follows his sister.

“Ah, well,” Margaery says. “Poor old dear. She _does_ take things so personally sometimes. It can’t be easy, having been alive for all these years, constantly looking over your shoulder. I hope I’ve got half her fortitude left when I’m her age.”

She excuses herself, and the documentary crew give her a wide berth as she leaves the room, smiling coyly back at them once or twice. The new guy takes half a step to follow her, mildly entranced, but the others stop him.

When she’s gone, it’s only Brienne left, and she stubbornly continues the ruse of pretending to look for a book, refusing to acknowledge that the others have gone.

* * *

“When you’re a vampire,” Brienne says later, quietly, so the others can’t hear her. “You can either hold on to grudges for centuries, or you can put them aside almost immediately. Cersei and Margaery do both at the same time.”

“What about you?” one of them asks.

“I don’t hold grudges.”

“What about Jaime?”

Brienne seems startled by that. The others are getting farther away, up ahead. Even Stannis is with them tonight, as they all decided to take a walk down to the beach. Cersei looks a bit like she strolled off the set of a period film, but the rest of them look like they bought their clothing within the last fifty years or so, which according to Podrick is a bit of an accomplishment.

“What _about_ Jaime?” she asks.

“You still hate him for turning you.”

“I don’t hate Jaime.”

“That’s not what Jaime said.”

“ _What_?” For the first time, Brienne seems genuinely shaken. She’s captured in the camera, looking like a trapped animal. Her big blue eyes are even bigger and more luminous in the moonlight, and they swivel towards where Jaime walks arm-in-arm with his sister. “Did he really say that?”

“He did,” one of the crew confirms; they’re quite good at lying, too, when they want to be.

“I don’t hate Jaime,” Brienne says again, her voice stronger than before. Almost angry. “I don’t.”

“He thinks you do,” one of them replies.

The conversation is broken up by shouts up ahead. Brienne breaks into a run, but Podrick hangs back.

“Werewolves,” he says. “Classic. Stark pack, probably. They _hate_ the twins.”

It is, indeed, a pack of werewolves that have caused all the commotion. Jaime and Cersei are hissing and spitting at them already, like a puffed-up pair of cats. Margaery is grinning and waving coquettishly at a pretty redhead girl on the werewolf side. Stannis has his arms folded across his chest and is looking miserably into the distance, complaining that they _never_ make it to the beach without some nonsense happening.

There’s a lot of posturing on both sides. The leader of the werewolves rips off his hoodie, revealing a poorly homemade t-shirt with “Stark Squad!” written in black marker across the chest. His right-hand man does the same. The redhead is plainly embarrassed by the whole thing. There’s a younger lad who runs around on all fours and howls incessantly. Another boy sighs loudly and calls them all heathens. And, finally, a short girl who whips out a wicked-looking knife almost as soon as the clash begins.

“That child brought a knife,” Cersei shouts, ducking partly behind Jaime.

“Your brother bought a _sword_ ,” the leader of the werewolves points out. Jaime has, in fact, brandished his sword in retaliation for the small girl holding the knife, which seems like an overreaction to everyone involved, including Jaime.

“Why does she even need a knife? You have _claws_ ,” Stannis huffs.

“It’s not the full moon, idiot,” the child says. Jaime decides to double down on the whole sword thing instead of admitting it as an overreaction and putting it away.

“I wouldn’t have to bring a sword if you lot would stay off our route to the beach! We had an agreement!”

“You had an agreement with my dad, twenty years ago, you dusty old _turd_ ,” the ringleader shouts back at him.

“They’re an old family,” Podrick says aside to the crew. “That’s Robb Stark. He’s the head of the pack now. Next to him is his cousin Jon, and that’s his sister Sansa, there, the one flirting with Margaery.”

Robb seems to be able to hear Pod’s quiet explanations, because his head snaps over to where his younger sister is, in fact, flirting with Margaery.

“Sansa!” he cries. “Are you serious?”

“What?” Sansa asks.

“Margaery, you little traitor _bitch_ ,” Cersei shouts.

“Honestly, it’s disgusting,” Jaime agrees.

“Fleas, or something,” Cersei offers.

“ _Disgusting_?” asks the girl with the knife.

“Their sister Arya,” Pod whispers.

“Fuck you, Lannisters!” Arya says, leaping at them. Jaime blocks her first wild thrust, but she manages to stab him in the hand with the second, startling him badly enough that he drops the sword. Robb for some reason decides to rip off his t-shirt as well, and he throws it into the crowd of vampires, who react with far more drama than is necessary. All except Stannis, who is now chatting with the one Stark boy who was already bored of all this before it started, and who now looks even more so. Jon admonishes Arya with _we’re werewolves, not swearwolves_. The feral one tries to bite Jaime on the ankle, but he’s saved by the fact that he’s still wearing those knee-high boots. Margaery is twirling a strand of the redhead’s hair around her finger, leaning in for a kiss.

“Enough!” Brienne bellows, pushing out in front of the rest of the vampires so that she stands ahead of them. She always looks impressive next to them, but she looks especially impressive now, her broadness and tallness causing her to tower above all of the werewolves, most of whom are rather small-ish.

The werewolves cower back a little bit, looking embarrassed.

“Sorry, Brienne,” says Robb.

“Yeah, sorry,” Arya parrots. The rest of them utter the same sentiments, looking genuinely chagrinned. Like, obviously they can’t put their tails between their legs, because they’re currently human, but the vibe is there.

“We’ve talked about this road, Robb,” Brienne says. “We like to go to the beach, just like anyone else. And it’s not even a full moon. I think Catelyn would be interested to hear that her children are out roaming in a pack like this, starting trouble with vampires.”

“Aw, come on, Brienne,” Robb whines. “Don’t be like that. It’s a misunderstanding. I forgot about the road, all right?”

“Bullshit! He just didn’t think you’d be with us!” Jaime insists.

“Sister-fucker,” Arya says.

“ _Arya_ ,” Robb and Jon snap together.

* * *

“It was _hundreds_ of years ago,” Jaime laments later. “We haven’t in _literal centuries_. But that’s all anyone wants to talk about.”

“People love a fucked up story,” Cersei rationalizes. The twins are doing a confessional together, this time, though reluctantly. For all the time they spend together, they seem uncomfortable now, pressed against opposite sides of the couch, as far from each other as they can get. “A pair of twins killing the husband of one and then ruling a country while fucking. It’s…you have to admit. It’s _interesting_.”

“It’s humiliating,” Jaime argues. “You were fucking half the country behind my back!”

“Well, yes.” Cersei looks quite pleased with that. “Margaery would have never pulled that off, come to think of it.”

The documentary crew have become used to this, at this point, and they all just nod obediently when she looks at them for a reaction.

* * *

“She made me think that I was the only one,” Jaime says, later, alone. Maudlin again, because he usually is. He frowns up at the ceiling. “I hated her for it for a time, but there’s something comforting about having her nearby. She used to tell me that we were two halves of the same soul. Bullshit, obviously, and she only said it to try and make me do her bidding, but I was the fool who believed it. Wanted to believe it, maybe.”

“What about Brienne?” one of the crew asks.

“What _about_ Brienne?”

“How did she factor in? Why’d you turn her? Did you go against your sister’s wishes for it?”

Unlike Brienne, Jaime seems suspicious of their line of questioning suddenly turning towards his friend. He looks at each of them in turn. All four of them.

“Brienne saw what she wanted to see in me, the same as I saw what I wanted to see in Cersei,” he says quietly. “And she paid for that trust with her life, same as I did.”

“But you love her,” one of the documentary crew points out. Jaime regards them for a few moments. Sizing them up. He lies back down on the couch and looks back up at the ceiling.

“You’re missing someone,” he says finally. “Margaery probably ate the new guy, too.” 

* * *

By the time the ghosts pop up, the crew has gotten used to a certain amount of oddness surrounding the vampires. They’ve met vampires before, obviously. They’ve met scary vampires, evil vampires, friendly vampires, totally banal and disappointingly boring vampires. But the housemates are an odd combination of everything at once, and so much _shit_ happens to them.

“Sometimes I _do_ wonder what my life would have been like if I signed up with a different vampire,” Pod admits once. “Being a familiar isn’t an easy job, but maybe it would have been easier with someone else. I love my mistress. And I love all of her friends, too. But it’s…well. _You_ know.”

“We do,” confirms the third “new guy” in three weeks.

So when something happens that causes the ghosts of the human souls of each of the vampires to come back to haunt the vampires, the documentary crew doesn’t even blink. They struggle a bit with how to capture the ghosts on camera, but it ends up being fairly easy with a few added filters, and the ghosts are happy to help them experiment until they get the right lighting.

Margaery’s human ghost is surprisingly sweet, and she makes Vampire Margaery uncomfortable in a way that feels almost like guilt; the ghost spends her time berating her vampire self for all the destruction she’s caused.

“All those poor boys,” she says, which makes Vampire Margaery snort in amusement and wave her off the first time, but Ghost Margaery is persistent, reminding Vampire Margaery of her brothers, and her nephews, and the people she loved as a mortal, who she has all but forgotten over the years. Vampire Margaery promises that she’ll be more careful in choosing her victims, and Ghost Margaery is able to move on.

“As if,” Vampire Margaery declares gleefully once Ghost Margaery has left. “Gods, she was so gullible. I’d forgotten how annoying I was as a human. Good riddance.”

* * *

_Cersei’s_ ghost is very much like her vampire self, actually. To the point where they spend a long day sitting in the attic, going through Cersei’s storage, laughing over old photographs and old paintings and Jaime’s old diaries.

“I’d forgotten how much I’ve always liked myself,” Vampire Cersei says, and Ghost Cersei laughs and agrees, and by the end of the day they’ve decided that Ghost Cersei doesn’t _need_ to move on, and she takes up possession of the terrifying doll that Jaime once made for Vampire Cersei. Unsurprisingly, the doll is made _more_ terrifying by the addition of a spirit within it, especially when it blinks. Cersei takes to carrying it around everywhere afterward, and eventually, about a year later, will declare to everyone in the house that she and her ghost are in love, which prompts Jaime to laugh for a full thirty seconds before declaring that _it makes so much sense, oh gods_.

* * *

The ghosts of Jaime and Brienne are, well. Exactly as expected.

Jaime was turned by his sister before he even met Brienne. He was turned when he still believed that his purpose was to do anything for Cersei. When the idea of loving anyone but Cersei would have never even occurred to him. When Jaime tells him that he and Cersei are no longer together, Ghost Jaime doesn’t believe him.

“She was fucking half of Kings Landing, by her own admission,” Vampire Jaime tries. “Tell him, Cers.”

“Oh, that’s definitely true,” both Cerseis say together, on their way up to the attic to spend the day reminiscing about when they were human.

Ghost Jaime is quite heartbroken about that, but Vampire Jaime fills him in, telling him all about the adventures he went on as a vampire that helped him get over his sister. After a while, even Ghost Jaime, oblivious and brokenhearted as he is, has to pick up on the Brienne thing.

“Surely it can’t be _that_ obvious,” Vampire Jaime insists, but Ghost Jaime gives him an apologetic shrug.

“Surely it can’t be _true._ I can’t conceive of a world in which Cersei is not at the center for me, but you claim it’s the truth.”

“Yeah, this guy sucks,” Vampire Jaime decides.

“I’m still you,” Ghost Jaime reminds him.

“No, you aren’t,” Vampire Jaime says, like that’s really important. “I’m _me_ now. Parts of you are still here, and maybe you aren’t as wretched as I remember. You’re still not _me_.”

“What does that mean, exactly?” Ghost Jaime asks.

“I don’t know. But it has to mean _something_.”

* * *

Brienne, meanwhile, is faced with a woman who is annoyed to find that her ultimate sacrifice was for nothing.

“It was meant to be a pure gesture of love,” she says. “Because it was the only thing I could give him.”

“We’ve given him hundreds of years of friendship,” Vampire Brienne points out. “That’s better than dying for him.”

“To die glorious in battle was our ultimate dream!” Ghost Brienne tries to insist. Vampire Brienne has a kind of unpleasant look on her face.

“No it wasn’t,” she says. “We didn’t _have_ a dream. We didn’t know _what_ to dream, remember? We were just trying to survive. We were just scared, and we loved him.”

“No,” Ghost Brienne insists stubbornly. Shaken. “No, we were brave.”

“I remember being frightened.”

“We weren’t.”

“Gods, we were stubborn, weren’t we?”

“No we weren’t!”

“I suppose I still am. Jaime saved us for a reason.”

“Because he felt guilty,” Ghost Brienne says. Brienne hesitates.

“Yes,” she says. “That was probably his reason at the time.”

“Have you ever told him?” Ghost Brienne’s stubborn pride ebbs a bit as she asks. Hesitant, like she’s not sure she wants to know the answer. As if hearing about a rejection from Jaime would hurt _her_ just as much as if she was the one who got it. Vampire Brienne feels sorry for her. That’s obvious in the way she looks at her, sad, like Ghost Brienne is a child who doesn’t understand.

“No,” she says. “I never told him why.”

“You should,” Ghost Brienne says. “I want him to know. I think that’s why I’m here.”

* * *

So Ghost Brienne is lurking awkwardly in the background as Vampire Brienne knocks on Jaime’s door. Ghost Jaime is lurking quite similarly in Jaime’s room. Both ghosts are dressed in the armor they wore in life, and maybe a different sort of documentary crew would try to capture the contrast, or something, in how they are so much more unguarded now that they are undead than they were when they were alive. Jaime in his wonky regency wet dream clothes. Brienne in her extreme neon and swishy tracksuit. Maybe this whole thing would be a touch sexier if they were still in their armor, but their ghosts just kind of eye each other distrustfully and don’t seem like they’re in the mood for sexiness, so it’s the clash of fashion that the documentary crew is stuck filming.

“I was willing to die for you,” Brienne says.

“You literally did,” Jaime fires back, defensive, like he thinks Brienne is saying something she’s not.

“Because I loved you,” Brienne finishes.

“Oh.”

They stare at each other. One of the documentary crew has to cough, or maybe laugh, and either way he appears to be struggling.

“Well?” Brienne finally asks.

“Well what?”

“I told you that I was in love with you.”

“You used past tense. I’m trying to decide what that means.”

“It means _I_ was willing to die for you,” Ghost Brienne says.

“Well then you’re a fool,” Ghost Jaime snaps. “Because I was in love with Cersei.”

“And you always will be,” Ghost Brienne says.

“Uh, no, sorry. Gonna stop you there. You don’t know me.” Jaime looks between the Briennes suspiciously. “You don’t _still_ think that, do you?”

“No,” Vampire Brienne says.

“Of course I do,” Ghost Brienne says.

“She doesn’t count,” Vampire Brienne says.

“I don’t still love her. I mean, I do. It was love, then hate for a while, then regretful sort of nostalgia, then hate again, then it was very, _very_ briefly love again. Like when you forget how shit a thing is, so you think you’ll try it again? And then you remember halfway through ‘oh, right, this is total shit. This is why I stopped doing it’. And then it was back to hate. But now it’s firmly on the kind of normal, zero-fucking-involved love that normal people have for their normal sisters.”

“Normal three times in the same sentence,” Ghost Jaime points out. “That’s convincing.”

“If _you’d_ dealt with nearly a millennia of people making sister-fucking jokes, you’d be defensive too,” Vampire Jaime says, defensively.

“I believe you,” Vampire Brienne says.

“I don’t,” Ghost Brienne retorts.

“We’ve already established that you don’t count,” Jaime says. He doesn’t take his eyes off Brienne. “I know you blame me for this. Turning you. Making you into a monster.”

“I don’t.”

“You’ve said it, though. Again and again.”

“I was afraid.”

“Of what? Of me?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Letting you know that I was grateful. I would have died for you, but that would have been a foolish thing to do. I’m grateful you let me live, instead. I have done so many things that I never would have had the chance to do. It’s better this way. And I’m glad I didn’t die for you, because you never would have understood.”

“Understood what?”

He’s fishing now, and Vampire Brienne seems to know it. She smiles a bit. She doesn’t smile often with her teeth. Her fangs are quite big, and obvious, and they’re obvious now. Jaime smiles back at her.

“That I love you still,” Brienne says, and Jaime sucks in a sharp, delighted breath before he lunges at her. Ghost Jaime and Ghost Brienne choose that moment to dissipate, and the documentary crew take the opportunity to do the closest possible thing to it of which mortals are physically capable.

* * *

Stannis doesn’t have a ghost, because Stannis didn’t technically die. Just continued on, sucking energy out of every room he’s ever entered. No one really knows where energy vampires come from, probably because they can’t stand to listen to energy vampires describe what happened that made them different.

Stannis doesn’t have a ghost, but the crew go downstairs to see him anyway, to tell him what happened upstairs.

“Good,” he says, shortly, handing their leader a wad of dozens of different kinds of currency that hopefully amount to the agreed-upon fee. “Tell Melisandre I’m pleased with her services.”

“If I can ask a question?” ventures one of the crew. “Why’d you hire us? Mel said you were looking for dirt to use against your housemates, but why the thing about Jaime and Brienne? Matchmaking doesn’t really seem like your vibe.”

“They’ve gotten good at avoiding me, all of them,” Stannis says mildly, pleased to be asked. For once, he doesn’t take the opportunity to spin it into something that will yield energy. Just speaks plainly, for which we should all be grateful. “But if there’s one thing that people hate more than an energy vampire, it’s a new couple. For the next couple of hundred of years, at least, the others will be desperate to avoid the two of them. Maybe finally desperate enough to talk to _me_.”


End file.
